61–70 of 79 posts
After all of these years I trust them to do the right thing with the open source aspect.
I've never met a more competent and energetic technical "salesperson" than David. I got the impression he spent at least a decade travelling full time, evangelizing MySQL (sales) in the 90s/00s. Mad respect. This is what it took. It didn't happen by itself.
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I'm surprised the employees aren't making a buy out offer at this point. I'd love to own a reasonable fraction of the company I work for at that sort of price and would happily throw in some of my savings.
Pumping my savings into a struggling company so that when it eventually fails I'm not only unemployed but also out of savings? That's a concentration risk I wouldn't want to have if I were a MariaDB employee.
MariaDB itself is GPL, no? https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-licenses/ That makes it a bit different than something like Mongo or Elasticsearch suddenly going with a business friendly license. However, I still would wonder about the health of the committership community independent of this company. The job of a good foundation is to steward the project accordingly, and I wonder if MariaDB has been community or compan…
Actually the Business Source License was originally created by MariaDB! It was applied to their database proxy product MaxScale. The core database server will always be GPL though, especially as a fork of MySQL under the GPL. MariaDB has a community and foundation which (afaik) is independent of the company.
Hah, so MariaDB was created because the creator of MySQL got pissed about the acquisition by Sun/Oracle, and now MariaDB might be acquired as well? Making bank while forking their project over and over isn't a bad way to make a living it seems.
I have lately been wondering if culture has forgotten how to run any organisation apart from a for profit corporation or a KPI driven NGO. E.g. an association, a co-operative etc. These all require collaboration and entrepreneurship and innovation without it being a competition via KPI or everything justified by the dollar (as is often the case sometimes even in charities)
30M is an absurdly small number for the embodied IP. (I worked briefly @ Clustrix, the tech is legit, ~$75M funding burned)
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They sell support to anyone with a MariaDB database that needs it. Many customers. Pretty cheap. Source: Used to work there.
The original way of making money with FOSS that folks like Hashicorp and InfluxData fail to understand while they push for unicorn status.
But at risk because a large company can offer the support as part of a larger offering. For example, if you were a large company on AWS or Azure, would you rather get your MySQL/MariaDB support through MariaDb or through Amazon/Microsoft?
Their market cap is $30m, which is more or less what a YC company with good prospects will be valued at nowadays for a seed round. Crazy
MariaDB has $50M annual recurring revenue but is spending almost $100M in the same time. There’s only a few millions of cash left, and liabilities outweigh assets. It’s on the brink of bankruptcy.
If you bought this company for $30M now, you’d have to pay at least another $30M just to make it through the next few quarters. The investors acquiring the company must be planning big cuts.